“It Is Time for Thee, Lord, to Work: For They Have Made Void Thy Law” (Psalm 119:26)

By Dr. H. T. Spence

Our contemporary state of affairs finds us deeper in the tragic death of humanity’s purpose of existence for which God created him. Our times are as the days of Noah:

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart (Gen. 6:5, 6).

The putrefaction and decay of this death continues to deepen culturally, religiously, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

Because of the depth of man’s falling away from God’s original intent, his very thinking has been affected. Globally today, mankind has fully entered the dark, cold, foreboding caverns of the death of reason. Mankind now dwells on the other side of reason, the side of existentialism and postmodernism. The political and demonic powers that lead the world today have created an abounding of angst (fear) and hopelessness, spreading perplexities so complicated that man lives simply to get by from day to day with an aimless existence.

The ever-expanding epistemology of humanity’s pursuits in science and technology (yielding advancements in both industrial and genetic engineering) has continued to feed both mankind’s love of self-deification and, ironically, his despair concerning impending self-destruction. In his vain excitement, mankind ultimately believes he will ascend in power to the throne of God. Yet he does not see that the evil burning within his bosom will use this epistemology to his own demise. Of all the accomplishments man can boast, he still cannot control or have dominion over the dark powers and forces that rage within him. Everything he touches that seems to lead him to higher spheres of conquest ultimately empowers the raging storm of evil within him. He tries to convince himself that this storm within is simply a genetic problem lingering from the ancestral DNA of his evolutionary beginnings. He believes one day his evolutionary ascent will discover a way to surmount his proclivity to self-destruction. His ultimate achievement is to enter the realm of perfection and deity.

What he cannot see is that his rejection of the true God is equally a rejection of his created nativity. Created perfect, holy, and righteous, man fell from his nativity with no hope to ever return by his own power to that which God first created. Thus, mankind’s nature is ever corrupt, and it is ever deepening in the mire of that corruption. No matter the depth of knowledge in tampering and redesigning the genetic code or chemical imbalance of man, he will never deliver himself from what he innately is. History continues to prove that the more man seems to accomplish in his scientific abilities, the deeper the evil becomes and the greater and more diabolical the sin principle progresses. Yea, his very accomplishments in every realm of human existence tend to feed his ever-deepening wickedness.

The Great Corruption of America

Our own country is in shocking, utter chaos as every day drives us to greater insanity and self-extinction. This very country that was established upon the belief of God and His Scriptures is now found in an all-out war against righteousness, truth, morality, true Christianity, and against the very God and His Word which gave birth to its history and uniqueness.

Because of the present national debauchery of thinking and low living, we are now witnessing a society given to publicly spewing the lowest, most obscene talk to feed the demoralization of the land. Such speech is promoted by the news media through Hollywood stars and politicians to feed deeper obstinacy, haughtiness, and vulgarity of living. Has there ever been a day in our history where such evil speech has become the norm of the public arena of conversation? The vulgar ABC talk show “The View” has brought feminism to such a national anti-God political authority that its own Joy Behar has described Christians as being “mentally ill.” We now read of the state of California openly debating outlawing the Bible. The national news now parades the Boy Scouts of America organization and the changes that have been forced upon it to permit girls to join. But it seems that was not enough, for the organization now wants to provide whatever is necessary for the mixture of genders to indulge at an early age in fornication within this group of youths. We read with regularity of the burning of the American flag; such an act is considered free speech, but erecting crosses as roadside memorials is not. While the FCC now permits the worst of the four-letter words on TV, to openly thank God at a high school graduation is denied. Some schools are freely dispensing packaged goods to promote immorality among children, while pencils reading “Jesus loves little children” were confiscated from a first-grade class in Virginia.

We have entered openly and aggressively into a “cultural war” against Christianity in Western civilization. We must ever remember that the Constitution does not use the phrase “separation of Church and State.” But it does declare, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (emphasis added). This means that unlike England, the United States decided not to form an official national religion, nor can the government interfere with the practice of any religion. In fact, in 1789, in the days after Congress passed the First Amendment, it declared a national day of prayer.

Although Congress cannot prohibit the free exercise of religion, still the number of bans on public displays of Christianity continues to grow. While these symbols may have fallen into the hands of Neo-Christianity, they still symbolize the biblical past of our country. The censorship laws of England are fast making their way to America. The internet gatekeepers such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and MySpace are bearing down strongly in their growing discrimination against Christianity. One of the biggest promises of the internet’s beginning was access to unfettered free speech for all. However, more recent years have proved that Christians are one of the few groups being censored online by these gatekeepers; additionally, conservative groups trying from a secular perspective to slow down the inevitable overthrow of the country have been censored.

While the public permissibility of Christianity in other countries is fast becoming extinct, in America the sheer number of churches has made Christianity’s extinction more difficult. Even apart from the local churches, Christian expression through public media and personal evangelism is now being viewed as undesirable and even deemed “unlawful.” The true Gospel is increasingly quelled and denied access into the public outlets of society. Meanwhile, liberalism, atheism, humanism, and all forms of ungodly expressions are sweeping over our country and are making inroads into most churches and religious institutions. Though President Donald Trump is in the White House, the liberal powers and their desecrating push to deepen the aggressive lifestyle of immorality (along with their perversions and inversions of desecration of the sacred) are marching on with little hindrance. Such demonically energized powers are in a forced march to take over every precinct of America’s living. No matter what laws protect the right and the true, to such evil men and women there is to be no concept of truth. Even now progressive forces have so taken hold of our country that we could easily see in our lifetime the outlawing of Christianity publicly.

The Cry of the Remnant

Nestled within Psalm 119 (a psalm dedicated to the Word of God) rises a remnant cry of verse 126, “It is time for thee, LORD, to work; for they have made void thy law.” Amidst the unfolding of prophecy covering the entire history of the world, the Bible reveals that there have been and will be seasons of intense attacks and persecutions against God and His people. Even the increase of demonic powers collaborating with man against God and His people will become more readily evident in certain seasons of history. This is especially true for the End Time of the last days. There have been a few seasons or crisis hours in history when the surge of evil was so great there was the cry from God’s remnant, “LORD, Thou must work! Thou must intervene! The very existence of Thy Name as well as Thy people is at stake!”

Such dark seasons seemed to have arisen in the days of Enoch before he was translated, in the days of Noah before the flood, in the days of the children of Israel in Egypt, in the days of the flight of David from Saul, in the days of Hezekiah when the Assyrians were ready to storm the walls of Jerusalem, in the days of Jeremiah when it seemed that all had forsaken the Lord, in the days of Ezra when the remnant was dying off because of the sin of God’s people marrying the enemies of God, and in the days of the Maccabean brothers when Antiochus Epiphanes had profaned the sacred temple in Jerusalem.

In Psalm 119:126, the psalmist does not tell God what to do; his heart is caught in the sight of the powers of evil and evildoers, and he cries out to God believing it is time for Him to work. “They have made void thy law!”—the wicked have made void (or abrogated) God’s law. They have professedly and openly cast off its authority; they have trampled down God’s Word as worthless and meaningless. Such men have not only sinned against the Law of God but also have done everything to annul that law, yea, to destroy that law.

Dear reader, this is where we are at this most critical hour in history! We are at a crucial hour when the world has, with all its arrogant confidence, in all its wicked actions, and in every field of thought, denied the existence of God and made void His law. They flauntingly and maliciously cry out, “Who is the Lord!?” “What is the Almighty that we should fear Him or even listen to Him?” The sad plight of our fallen nation today gives clear evidence that our society has sinned against the Law of God! It must also be said that our society has sinned away the law of God! These sins go beyond the borders of our nations, for world governments are repealing God’s laws in their parliaments and congresses and enacting their own lusts as the governing law of men.

Nevertheless, the deepest concern should not be that we are being affected by these changes of law. The burden of the Christian heart should be for the vindication of God’s own honor. Therefore, we cry, “It is time for Thee, Lord, to work!” It is time for God to do something about the effectual slander of atheists and infidels; it is time to silence those that set their mouths against heaven. Have we come to the time when the cup of iniquity is full? When will God finally take hold? Yes, we cry out to God in our view of this moment of world crisis!

But there will come a time when God will say, “Now I will arise, saith the LORD.” When I was a young boy, I witnessed unrighteousness and unjust actions. My young heart would become so frustrated over injustices that I would ask my father, “Why doesn’t God do something about it?” My father in his wisdom of Scripture responded, “One day, Son, God will do something about it, but it may not be now.” How many times have we cried out to God when crises were taking place, “Lord, it is time for thee to work.” God was working, but perhaps not in the way we thought He should in that moment of time. We hear of the terrorism and the injustices of our times, when it seems that the wicked are getting away literally with murder, when the ungodly are prospering, when their word of authority is reigning over the people, and when the righteous are perishing in the earth. It is a time when “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us” (Ps. 2:2, 3). At this hour when the world is deepening its words and actions to make void God’s law, our hearts cry, “It is time for Thee, Lord, to work.”

Conclusion

But a greater grief than that of the falling away of our country has been the grief of witnessing the collapse of public, historic Fundamentalism brought about by the leadership of the movement in recent decades. They have led the people into subtle, but intelligent, changes in standards of living, changes in dress, changes in music and in preaching, and overt compromises with Neo-Christianity. How sad it is that school campuses (paid for in the past by people who believed they were giving their money for the preservation of a school standing for truth) are now fully given over to the powers of compromising Christianity, the very Neo-Christianity that the school took a stand against in former days of strength and communion with God. Why did the changes come? How did their falling away take place? The answer is simple and clear—they made void God’s Word and Law in their living and in their ministries. They made void the Word by questioning it, critiquing it, debating it, shaving the truth here and there. They stripped the Word’s power away from working among the people, from its manifestation in their classrooms and publications. They quelled its manifestation by sterilizing the truth and watering down what the Word of God actually said, forcing the Scriptures into relevancy with the contemporary. As we witness professing Christian schools, churches, ministries, and many preachers falling away, we cry in this most urgent hour, “It is time for thee, LORD, to work: for they have made void thy law.”

We may ask, “How have the leaders in Fundamentalism made void God’s Law?” By denying the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, by denying its preservation, by exalting tradition over its literality, by raising questions of skepticism against God’s Word, and by debating “what is the text” and its interpretation. But all of this has come from making void God’s law in their hearts through indifference, lukewarmness, and apathy! Yes, this is the way we make void God’s law in our lives.

We are in a time when it is rare to witness people seeking God and crying out to God. The time of crisis could be upon us, but is it within our heart to cry out to God? We can make void God’s Law in our own life, by slipping away from the voice of God, by leaving our first love, by refusing to respond when the Lord convicts the heart of its complacency. Christ warned His disciples in the Olivet Discourse, “Because iniquity [lawlessness] shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold” (Matthew 24:12). When lawlessness abounds in the land and in the churches, when lawlessness flourishes and prospers, with the very environment of an age saturated with such lawlessness, then that powerful influence will be felt by God’s saints. For when lawlessness rules the land and pervades the very atmosphere of our age, there will be the tendency to cool off in our fervent love (agape) for God. When this happens, we will not live as conscientiously as we once did. The age will have affected us. Oh, are we making God’s Law, His Very Word, void in our lives?

The cry of God’s remnant at this hour is, “It is time for thee, LORD, to work!” But we must not forget the verses that follow:

Therefore I love thy commandments above gold; yea, above fine gold. Therefore I esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to be right; and I hate every false way (Ps. 119:127, 128).

This declaration must be our heart when the world, the governments, the news media, the professing Christian schools, and the churches are making void God’s Law.